48 fps+ is pretty much unavoidable for good looking 3D cinema. 24 fps is simply not enough in that case. The Hobbit is a native 3D film, so from that point of view, it most certainly makes sense to project it at 48 fps in 3D mode. Stereoscopic films look better at higher frame rates, I doubt there are many that would preffer 24 fps projection here - especially since stereoscopy is already a strange enough experience on its own, that it won't invite subconcious comparisons with TV/video viewing.

For 2D, 24 fps does have its charm, so I am not particularly eager to see it changed. But 48 fps as opposed to 60 fps does have the particular advantage of being relatively easy to convert to 24 fps for 2D projection, so I don't see why they wouldn't project it as 48 fps for 3D viewings and use a 24 fps master for the 2D viewings.

I think this is a storm in a teacup. Most people who saw it said that it felt weird and wrong for the short clips since they couldn't get used to it that fast, but it also created a greater feeling of actually seeing something real. The "Riddles in the dark"-bit apparently looked amazing, even with unfinished FX, so I'm not too worried. Peter Jackson is moving to 48 fps, James Cameron is considering 48 or 60 fps for his next movies and a lot of other big Hollywood directors are very interested in it. I think the final holdouts in Hollywood will be Nolan and the 'Berg.

I recall seeing a 60 fps film demo years ago, on a not particularly large but wide field of view screen, it was a lot better than ordinary 24 fps film for scenes with high levels of motion. It does look different, but not worse. The only issue I found was that the smooth motion and wide field of view, but of course sitting still in my seat, was enough to make me a feel a bit motion sick.

There's nothing special about 24 fps, and if early cinematographers had used 48 fps, that's what you'd consider to be "normal". In other words--you'll get used to it, and it's not a big deal.

Just because that's what they were forced to use by virtue of cost and technology, doesn't mean there isn't something special about it. Most people have lots of exposure to 24 with film, 30 with TV, ~15 with animation, and 60+ with video games. And for some people 24 still stands out as providing something extra in terms of visual appeal. What you're saying equates to "b&w used to be normal and now we have color, there was nothing special about b&w, it's just the best we could do." Clearly there's something special about b&w since people still use it very purposefully and effectively. Maybe 24 vs 48 vs 60 will become a stylistic choice in a similar way, but for people trying to tell a story visually it may remain a big deal for quite a while.

It's just something you have to get used to. Same thing happened when people first listened to CD, the sound was too clean. Same thing with the humanizer setting on old drum machines and sequencers, because electronic timing was too perfect.

Edit: It's like a Pavlov reaction, the slow framerate of traditional film sends us in a filmic, nostalgic and forgiving mood build up by the experience of previous movies.

It's a similar effect that noise has on audio and photos. Instagram is quite popular because of this phenomenon. But someone who has never seen a photo or movie before, would pick the noisefree high framerate version. It's just more realistic.

Wait a few years and 24fps will look old, outdated and headache inducing even. ;-)

I dislike modern TV features like "Smooth Motion" interpolation to create 60/120/240 FPS from lower native frame rate sources.

Well, it looks like what I thought was happening with the hobbit was all wrong...

I thought the hobbit was being filmed in 28FPS for a progressive optical stereo image, while the reality is that it really is being played at a native rate of 48FPS.

Native 48FPS is nothing at all remotely like Motion Smoothing interpolation. As there is nothing being created via a process. All 48 of the frames of every second exist. Where as Motion smoothing takes a 30 frame source and creates an additional 30 frames of material that do not exist in the source.

That technical BS aside, I'll reserve personal comment on it until I see what it looks like. As I am one of those that HATES with a passion motion smoothing. There is no reason, as of yet, for me yet to hate native 48 cinema.

Why oh why couldn't they have simply gone to 60 FPS? Now we're all going to need to get 240Hz LCD panels (48 * 5 = 240) in order to get an accurate picture without any kind of motion smoothing, frame interpolation, or judder.

I'm all for filming at FPS > 24, but they should have picked something more compatible with current HDTVs.

If 48fps movies make those god damn shaky cam fight scenes actually watchable, I'm willing to put up with any other issues that come with them

IMO, the only think that will make shaky cam fight scenes watchable is a steady cam, or better yet a camera on a dolly or crane. Fuuuuuuuk I hate deliberately shaky cam, more so when they dial it up to 11.

For 2D, 24 fps does have its charm, so I am not particularly eager to see it changed. But 48 fps as opposed to 60 fps does have the particular advantage of being relatively easy to convert to 24 fps for 2D projection, so I don't see why they wouldn't project it as 48 fps for 3D viewings and use a 24 fps master for the 2D viewings.

Only if you can shoot that 48 FPS stuff with a 360° shutter angle.

A lot of the charm in 24 FPS comes from the motion blur a 1/48th shutter speed gives to the images. This is also what 30 FPS video loses since it's usually shot with a 1/60th shutter speed. The only way you preserve the "charm" going from 48 to 24 FPS would be if you can shoot the 48 FPS material at a 1/48th shutter speed. If you're actually shooting at 48 FPS with a 1/96th shutter speed slowing it down to 24 FPS will just make it look sharp and studdery, not smooth.

If you're actually shooting at 48 FPS with a 1/96th shutter speed slowing it down to 24 FPS will just make it look sharp and studdery, not smooth.

Not sure about the actual numbers involved, but isn't that technique how you get the effect like in Saving Private Ryan where things look sort of stuttery and slow motion, almost like they are lit by a strobe?

A lot of the charm in 24 FPS comes from the motion blur a 1/48th shutter speed gives to the images. This is also what 30 FPS video loses since it's usually shot with a 1/60th shutter speed. The only way you preserve the "charm" going from 48 to 24 FPS would be if you can shoot the 48 FPS material at a 1/48th shutter speed. If you're actually shooting at 48 FPS with a 1/96th shutter speed slowing it down to 24 FPS will just make it look sharp and studdery, not smooth.

Actually, lots of stuff is shot at 24 fps without a 180° shutter angle, and it looks just fine. For instance, quite a lot of green screen material is shot with a (somewhat) higher shutter speed, because it gives the keyer cleaner edges to work with - not that it's hard to get even motion blurred edges to key properly, but in quite a few cases it helps. And of course just about anything that requires retiming (i.e. Twixtor & co) works best when shot with higher shutter speeds to get the edges as clean as possible for motion interpolation.

But getting back to the topic, The Hobbit is shot at 48 fps with a 270° shutter angle, this being the compromise Jackson and Lesnie agreed on looks best for both 48 and 24 mastering. It doesn't smear as much as a 360° angle would at 48 fps, and it still is smooth enough at 24 fps when helped by a touch of motion blur added in post (which is pretty easy to do, at least non-realtime, even in the most complicated scenes, far easier and less error prone than interpolating whole frames anyway).

If you're actually shooting at 48 FPS with a 1/96th shutter speed slowing it down to 24 FPS will just make it look sharp and studdery, not smooth.

Not sure about the actual numbers involved, but isn't that technique how you get the effect like in Saving Private Ryan where things look sort of stuttery and slow motion, almost like they are lit by a strobe?

As a happenstance effect, yes. The stroboscobic effect seen in Saving Private Ryan was produced by using a shorter exposure time (a small shutter angle) than usual that eliminated much of the motion blur that makes 24fps look reasonably fluid. Because The Hobbit was probably shot at 1/96 or 1/100 of a second or something like that, a naive reduction to 24fps would look similarly choppy. But there are more sophisticated techniques than simply throwing away frames that will do a better job of preserving fluidity and the cinematic appearance.

Note that because The Hobbit was not shot using film cameras and so isn't subject to the constraints of rotary shutters and maximum shutter angles, it could have been shot using exposure times as long as about 1/48th of a second if the filmmakers had so desired. They almost certainly did not do that because it would add unnecessary smearing to the image and negate the purpose of recording at 48fps in the first place, but it's worth noting that it's possible. Aforementioned naive framerate reduction would be flawless if it were recorded with these settings.

Actually, lots of stuff is shot at 24 fps without a 180° shutter angle, and it looks just fine.

Lots of stuff is shot at 30 FPS and 60 FPS and looks just fine too. I'm pretty sure The Hobbit, looks "just fine" as well. We're not talking about just fine though, we're talking about the nebulous "look" or "feel" or whatever you want to call it that people are clearly picking up on because of the deviation from slower frame rates and shutter speeds.

Lots of stuff is shot at 30 FPS and 60 FPS and looks just fine too. I'm pretty sure The Hobbit, looks "just fine" as well. We're not talking about just fine though, we're talking about the nebulous "look" or "feel" or whatever you want to call it that people are clearly picking up on because of the deviation from slower frame rates and shutter speeds.

By "looking fine" I mean you have seen tens of thousands of shots in 24 fps movies and TV series where various non-standard shutter speeds have been cut and/or comped together with 180° shutter shots, and you never noticed. Be it for keying purposes, retiming, shooting CRT screens, special lights (or standard 50 Hz lights in Europe), shooting high-frame rates in difficult lighting conditions, there are a lot of reasons to deviate (to a certain extent) from the 180° shutter rule, and most of the time those shots blend without anybody noticing anything.

When you noticed it, it is because it was used as an effect and/or dramaturgical means in telling a specific story - and when it is done like that, you have to really push it to become noticeable. For instance, the already mentioned "Saving Private Ryan" had to go down to a 45° angle shutter to get the strobing looking Kaminski was after, and even that by itself wouldn't have been quite enough - the shutter speed stood out because of a whole lot of other factors, like for instance the ENR processing of the film stock to get it to be far more contrasty (because high-contrast edges strobe more), using handheld camera and purposely destabilized lens elements (because wild motion strobes more), making sure they always had dust and water elements splashing around in front of the action (because small particles stand out when frozen in motion by short shutter speeds), out-of-phase shutter to get the highlights to streak in an unnatural way and even quite a lot of offspeed low-frame rate shots cut with the normal frame rate ones to give an extra jerkyness when needed. Basically, if you really want to have shutter speed/angle stand out, you need to go to all sort of extremes. Otherwise, without a lot of production design, shot conception and post work, non-standard shutter speeds will often simply be hard to notice, consciously or sub-consciously.

On top of that, the reproduction of motion blur itself has been going through quite a bit of change in the last years - as digital cameras began to replace film, they also began to change the look - classical mechanical rotary disk shutter blur looks somewhat different than electronic global shutter and rolling shutter technologies, making the picture look slightly (or even less slightly, in the case of the DSLR jellocams) different anyway.

Not to take anything from the aesthetic of how motion blur works, since I agree it is important to the feel of the image, but in the end, the frame rate itself plays a greater role in the perception of motion, especially if one doesn't deviate all too much from the standard shutter speeds and/or if one reintroduces the motion blur in post - that's what the Hobbit team is doing by shooting 48fps/270° as a compromise for both the 48fps and the 24fps masters. I don't think the negative reactions were caused by motion blur, in fact, I am pretty sure that if they had been shown a processed 2D 24 fps master, there would have been nary a mention of any "look" issues.

I think I have to mention that a lot of competitive PC game players do notice the difference between 60 and 100FPS so we still have a long way to go.Let me explain: basically, when I do reaction test, my scores are usually in the 100-200ms range. In such testing my 'wetware' is clearly the biggest delay in the whole loop (so the time it takes for the signal to travel from my eye to the brain and then to the hand), still, even a small reduction in the delay from the computer hardware helps a lot too - 24 FPS means that you only get updates on the input every 40 milliseconds or so, 100FPS can bring it down to 10ms, so my overall response time will be 110ms and not 140, for example which is significant enough for a pro player to pwn someone in a game.

Of course a lot of what I just wrote is insignificant to passive viewing - after all you'll just gasp or cry a few milliseconds later, but the point is, the difference is very noticeable at such low FPS, so any improvements are obviously very welcome on this front.

Lots of stuff is shot at 30 FPS and 60 FPS and looks just fine too. I'm pretty sure The Hobbit, looks "just fine" as well. We're not talking about just fine though, we're talking about the nebulous "look" or "feel" or whatever you want to call it that people are clearly picking up on because of the deviation from slower frame rates and shutter speeds.

By "looking fine" I mean you have seen tens of thousands of shots in 24 fps movies and TV series where various non-standard shutter speeds have been cut and/or comped together with 180° shutter shots, and you never noticed. Be it for keying purposes, retiming, shooting CRT screens, special lights (or standard 50 Hz lights in Europe), shooting high-frame rates in difficult lighting conditions, there are a lot of reasons to deviate (to a certain extent) from the 180° shutter rule, and most of the time those shots blend without anybody noticing anything.

When you noticed it, it is because it was used as an effect and/or dramaturgical means in telling a specific story - and when it is done like that, you have to really push it to become noticeable. For instance, the already mentioned "Saving Private Ryan" had to go down to a 45° angle shutter to get the strobing looking Kaminski was after, and even that by itself wouldn't have been quite enough - the shutter speed stood out because of a whole lot of other factors, like for instance the ENR processing of the film stock to get it to be far more contrasty (because high-contrast edges strobe more), using handheld camera and purposely destabilized lens elements (because wild motion strobes more), making sure they always had dust and water elements splashing around in front of the action (because small particles stand out when frozen in motion by short shutter speeds), out-of-phase shutter to get the highlights to streak in an unnatural way and even quite a lot of offspeed low-frame rate shots cut with the normal frame rate ones to give an extra jerkyness when needed. Basically, if you really want to have shutter speed/angle stand out, you need to go to all sort of extremes. Otherwise, without a lot of production design, shot conception and post work, non-standard shutter speeds will often simply be hard to notice, consciously or sub-consciously.

On top of that, the reproduction of motion blur itself has been going through quite a bit of change in the last years - as digital cameras began to replace film, they also began to change the look - classical mechanical rotary disk shutter blur looks somewhat different than electronic global shutter and rolling shutter technologies, making the picture look slightly (or even less slightly, in the case of the DSLR jellocams) different anyway.

Not to take anything from the aesthetic of how motion blur works, since I agree it is important to the feel of the image, but in the end, the frame rate itself plays a greater role in the perception of motion, especially if one doesn't deviate all too much from the standard shutter speeds and/or if one reintroduces the motion blur in post - that's what the Hobbit team is doing by shooting 48fps/270° as a compromise for both the 48fps and the 24fps masters. I don't think the negative reactions were caused by motion blur, in fact, I am pretty sure that if they had been shown a processed 2D 24 fps master, there would have been nary a mention of any "look" issues.

Please keep talking and discussing stuff like this, its fascinating and brining in some concepts that are new to me - TY =D

I'm all for filming at FPS > 24, but they should have picked something more compatible with current HDTVs.

There is a very large selection of HDTVs that have 240Hz refresh.

Most LCD HDTVs sold today are either 120Hz or 240Hz. Plasmas are entirely different beasts. Still, I doubt many of these 240Hz LCDs can actually process 48Hz input correctly. They will probably require a firmware upgrade.

If you are judging the quality of a film based on not having enough flicker you're doing it wrong.

The vast majority of humans can't see any flicker in films projected at 72Hz, and I doubt anyone is saying flicker is good (unless they are just using the wrong word)--what people do see more commonly at 24fps are motion blur and judder. Your own visual processing (eyes+brain) adds a certain amount of motion blur and judder to the real world as you perceive it (quick test: wave your hand in front of your face, see?). So there is a level of motion blur and judder that is exactly like the real world--but that value is definitely not 24fps. Is it better-reproduced at 48fps? Maybe, who knows, I don't. I suspect we're nowhere near totally realistic, so we're just trading one unrealistic film aesthetic for another, just like we did the last time we updated framerates. Which is fine, I've got no problem with that.

I'm willing to give 48fps an honest try, but my guess is it may take a few years for both audiences and cinematographers to figure it out, and the first impression will not be good regardless of how good the underlying tech is. But frankly, I'd be perfectly satisfied if today's cameramen just remembered to slow down the shutter speed during fast pans so that they have more blur than judder, that would fix 90% of the ugly panning judder disasters I see today (at least I assume that's why judder is so much more visible in theatres now than twenty or thirty years ago), and the framerate wouldn't have to change.

And I really hope people don't keep tying this to the success of 3D, or it'll be equally doomed. It may be worth pursuing in its own right.

A lot of the charm in 24 FPS comes from the motion blur a 1/48th shutter speed gives to the images. This is also what 30 FPS video loses since it's usually shot with a 1/60th shutter speed. The only way you preserve the "charm" going from 48 to 24 FPS would be if you can shoot the 48 FPS material at a 1/48th shutter speed.

Yes, but you can add as much motion blur as you like in post-processing. Its easy to take something that is not blurred and add blur. Its going the other way that is hard

IMO using higher speeds gives better flexibility and more detail. Then in post people can add whatever they need to create the effect they want.

NetMasterOC3 wrote:

If you're actually shooting at 48 FPS with a 1/96th shutter speed slowing it down to 24 FPS will just make it look sharp and studdery, not smooth.

This is not exactly right. The effect you get depends on how you downconvert. If you throw away every other frame, you've now 24 fps with a 25% duty cycle. If you do something like band-limited interpolation, you can get something similar to 24 fps with a 50% duty cycle (and actually identical if you don't have objects moving on screen comparable or faster then the 1/96th of a second shutter). In the case of doing 48 fps with a >75% duty cycle for instance (which is probably what you'd want to use), you can essentially always reproduce the 24 fps, 50% duty cycle exactly. Thats the point, its a choice you can make depending on what you want to do, rather then being stuck with always one way.

IMO going forward much high frame rates make a lot of sense. Maybe not for distribution, but certainly for capture and editing.

I think I have to mention that a lot of competitive PC game players do notice the difference between 60 and 100FPS so we still have a long way to go.Let me explain: basically, when I do reaction test, my scores are usually in the 100-200ms range. In such testing my 'wetware' is clearly the biggest delay in the whole loop (so the time it takes for the signal to travel from my eye to the brain and then to the hand), still, even a small reduction in the delay from the computer hardware helps a lot too - 24 FPS means that you only get updates on the input every 40 milliseconds or so, 100FPS can bring it down to 10ms, so my overall response time will be 110ms and not 140, for example which is significant enough for a pro player to pwn someone in a game.

Of course a lot of what I just wrote is insignificant to passive viewing - after all you'll just gasp or cry a few milliseconds later, but the point is, the difference is very noticeable at such low FPS, so any improvements are obviously very welcome on this front.

Keep in mind that "improvement" in one application is not "improvement" in all applications. When gaming your key metric is response time. When movie watching your metric is enjoyment.

Similarly, when hand-soldering fine-pitch devices, performing cardiac surgery, or fine-dicing onions I want the maximum amount of light on my subject, and from many angles to eliminate shadows. But I sure as hell don't want to read a novel for 2 hours in that kind of environment.

It's just something you have to get used to. Same thing happened when people first listened to CD, the sound was too clean.

Unless you're of the thinking that CDs sound bad. While the hand grenade's ticking I'll only say 6 CH input DVD-A does surpass CDs by a tangible margin. Sadly it failed.

*toss*

6Channel vs 2Channel = Apples vs Oranges comparison - so it's always an opinion. However, 2Ch DVD-A vs 2Ch CD, I have never been able to ABX them. I can however ABX of SACD vs DVD-A, I have usually been able to guess which is which. This is probably PCM vs DSD issue. I have never thought in any way that the sound was superior in the SACD version, just identifiable.

Now Multichannel vs Stereo is a short argument for me. Live music concerts generally sound better when properly done, but in this case it's really more like a Movie and usually I want to see the concert as well. For just simple music listening ... I've yet to hear a multichannel recording that I preferred to the stereo recording. I believe the issue is the lack of intimacy in most of the multichannel recordings (or just that it's less and I prefer more.) The few multi channels that seem to include enough intimacy, sounded basically identical to the stereo recording (see The Downward Spiral multichannel mixes.)

I don't think the negative reactions were caused by motion blur, in fact, I am pretty sure that if they had been shown a processed 2D 24 fps master, there would have been nary a mention of any "look" issues.

If that 24 FPS master, was blurred down to duplicate what is expected in terms of blurring at 24 FPS, I'd agree. However, the complaint was that the detail was too sharp; that's not, IMLE, an artifact of more FPS it's an artifact of faster shutter speeds and reduced blurring.

There's an interesting tension between per-frame motion blur and in-eye blur created by sufficiently high frame rates or overlong individual frames, and I suspect 48Hz simply isn't high enough.

My guess, as regards the "uncanniness" of 48fps vs 24fps is that the technology doesn't allow sufficient per-frame motion blur but still falls within the brain's flicker-perception range and so things leap out a bit.

What's really going to be interesting is when frames actually disappear and are replaced by per-pixel change timelines. That might actually simulate real vision.

However, 2Ch DVD-A vs 2Ch CD, I have never been able to ABX them. I can however ABX of SACD vs DVD-A, I have usually been able to guess which is which. This is probably PCM vs DSD issue. I have never thought in any way that the sound was superior in the SACD version, just identifiable.

Anyone know a good website with such an ABX comparison using uncompressed samples? I'd love to try this myself in my typical listening environment, just to see.

It doesn't. 24 fps with a 180° shutter angle results in a shutter speed of 1/48, which obviously is a catastrophe when using 50 Hz lighting. That is why all film cameras that were designed for shooting in Europe at 24 fps have a setting for a 172.8° shutter angle, which results in the correct shutter speed of 1/50.

Blindly following the 180° "rule" actually got quite a lot of people into trouble once they started shooting at 23.976 fps instead of clean 24 fps. If they came from a video background, they ignored fps relative shutter-angle based calculations and simply set absolute shutter speeds, but some digital cameras wanted to be hip, and let you set angle shutter speeds even if they didn't have a mechanical shutter. And while true 24 fps is generally safe at 180° (except for some cases where you actually need to go to 144° instead of 180°, like the classical scenario of shooting non-genlocked interlaced CRT screens, or even for some discharge lights without flicker free ballasts), 23.976 isn't - 1/47.96 exposures don't agree with 60 Hz-based lights, at least not with those that aren't flicker-free (for instance practicals like fluorescent hallway lights, etc.)

Quote:

If that 24 FPS master, was blurred down to duplicate what is expected in terms of blurring at 24 FPS, I'd agree. However, the complaint was that the detail was too sharp; that's not, IMLE, an artifact of more FPS it's an artifact of faster shutter speeds and reduced blurring.

More FPS are another way to "reduce blurring", making details look potentially sharper, because objects are blurred differently depending on whether they move, how fast they move, if and how the camera is moving, where the objects are positioned in relation to the camera, etc. You can shoot with an open shutter and make the motion blur of each of the 48 frames per second look like the motion blur of each of the 24 frames per second shot with a classical 180° shutter angle, but if you go to for instance 60 fps (what Cameron wants for Avatar 2 & 3), even shooting a 360° shutter angle will make the action in each individual frame less blurry.

In the case of The Hobbit, they shot 48 fps with a 270° shutter angle, i.e. a 1/64 shutter speed, which is really so close to the "standard" 1/48 that people think they are used to that I doubt the vast majority of the spectators could have even told the difference if they had been watching 24 fps at that shutter speed instead. In fact, looking at the 24 fps trailers of the film, and ignoring the problems stemming from the unfinished VFX and grading, I personally don't see issues with motion depiction in them.

I think it was very much the increased frame rate that created that "feeling" in some of the viewers, and it is actually pretty logical - up to the perception limit (wherever that may lie), adding more frames per second increases the amount of information we receive and process through our visual sensory system, and that can certainly create the sensation of increased detail.

redleader wrote:

IMO going forward much high frame rates make a lot of sense. Maybe not for distribution, but certainly for capture and editing.

One of the more interesting ideas I heard in this whole frame rate debate came a few years ago from Douglas Trumbull. As a pioneer of more fps since decades (and lone crusader, at least in the film days), the guy did a lot of experimental work and thought about how these frame rates can help or hinder telling a story. One of his ideas was that there is no reason in these days of digital cinema distribution that one couldn't even have variable playback frame rates within a film. Frame rate can be a means of artistic expression that can go beyond just slow-motion/time-lapse/etc. - you can just as well use it within your story to help you tell it in your own way - drop to 24 fps in dialogue sequences, jump to 72 fps in an action chase sequence, why the hell not?

24 fps is going to be an Instagram effect when they allow moving pictures in a future update and we are all going to complain that it looks fake!

Seriously looking forward to 48 fps cinema, I have always felt a small irritation on fast moving scenes and been able to see the flicker in my peripheral vision.

Well, 48fps probably won't fix that since 24fps is shown at 3:3 72Hz.

Care to explain to someone who isn't deeply entrenched in this field what difference "3:3 72Hz" means, 72 is 1.5*48 per second, but what does it actually mean? I thought more frames per second would be smoother since there would be less difference between each frame.

24 fps is going to be an Instagram effect when they allow moving pictures in a future update and we are all going to complain that it looks fake!

Seriously looking forward to 48 fps cinema, I have always felt a small irritation on fast moving scenes and been able to see the flicker in my peripheral vision.

Well, 48fps probably won't fix that since 24fps is shown at 3:3 72Hz.

Care to explain to someone who isn't deeply entrenched in this field what difference "3:3 72Hz" means, 72 is 1.5*48 per second, but what does it actually mean? I thought more frames per second would be smoother since there would be less difference between each frame.

If a frame is held static too long, it leaves after-images in the eye, and if the shutter moves too slowly the flicker becomes very perceptible. To prevent this, the shutter flickers and each frame is repeated 3 times in its 1/24th of second allotment. 3x24=72, so 24fps cinema generally has a 72Hz "refresh rate".